1926. Japan's Taisho emperor Yoshihito dies at age 47 after a 14-year reign. His son of 25 has acted as regent during the 5-year illness of Yoshihito and will reign until 1989 as the Showa emperor Hirohito. The influence of Japan's army and navy will increase enormously in the next 15 years.

1926. A British General Strikecripples the nation from May 3to May 12 as members of the Trade Union Congress rally to the slogan, "Not a penny off the pay, not a minute of the day."

1926. Ford Motor Company plants introduce an 8-hour day and a 5-day work week beginning September 5.

1926. The rocket launched March 16 by physicist Robert H. Goddard is the first liquid fuel rocket; it demonstrates the practicality of rockets and convinces Goddard that rockets will one day land men on the moon.

1926. Waltham, Mass., inventor Francis Wright Davis patents a power-steering unit and installs it in a 1921 Pierce-Arrow Runabout, but commercial production of cars with power steering will not begin until 1951.

Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems. Robinson Jeffers. American. 1925. Poetry. Religious feeling for the beauty of the red stallion which tramples her brutal husband to death. She shoots the stallion "out of some obscure human fidelity."

The Tower. Hugo Von Hofmannstahl. German. 1925. Poetic Drama. Adapted from Calderon's Life Is a Dream, with changes. Sigismund is killed.

The Trial. Franz Kafka. German. 1925. Novel. Confrontation of an individual and a baffling bureaucracy. Accused by mysterious legal authority of an unnamed crime about which he knows nothing. Fruitless attempts to gain justice from authority with which he cannot effectively communicate. Utter frustration, complete loss of human dignity, and cruel death by stabbing. Novel lends itself to innumerable allegorical interpretations.

A Vision. William Butler Yeats. Irish. 1925. Book. History is cyclical and recurrent, for the individual and mankind, in a gyre or corkscrew pattern; all human personality types have their opposite and antithetical selves or masks. Complete man should assimilate the characteristics of his mask. Supposedly dictated by spirits in automatic writing recorded by his medium wife.

Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf. British. 1925. Novel. One day in the life of.... She and Septimus never meet but they are alike in their emotionally bankrupt lives. He commits suicide. Lives connected by external events: airplane and passing bus. Stream of consciousness.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

1925. The Scopes "Monkey Trial" makes headlines in July as Dayton, Tenn., schoolteacher John T. Scopes, 25, goes on trial for violating a March 13 law against teaching evolution in the state's public schools.

1925. Bennington College for Women is founded at Bennington, Vt.

1925. The Supreme Court upholds the conviction of a man under the New York Criminal Anarchy Act of 1902. Benjamin Gitlow's pamphlet "The Left Wing Manifesto" called for "mass strikes," "expropriation of the bourgeoisie" and the establishment of a "dictatorship of the proletariat." The Court rules that this "is the language of direct incitement," but Justice Holmes observes that "every idea is an incitement" and Justice Brandeis joins in the dissent.

1925. The New Yorker begins publication in February, edited by journalist Harold W Ross, a weekly magazine of satire, fiction, social commentary and criticism. Humorist James Grover Thurber, 30, will become a New Yorker regular after receiving rejection slips for his first 20 submissions.

1925. Collier's editor William Ludlow Cheney sends three staff writers on a nationwide tour to report on Prohibition. They find a breakdown in law enforcement of all kinds and Collier's becomes the first major magazine to call for a repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment that has been in effect since January 1920. The magazine loses 3,000 readers but gains 4000,000 new ones.

1925. "The Charleston" is introduced to Paris by "Bricktop," a red-headed American who arrived penniless from her native Harlem last year and has become hostess of a Place Pigalle nightclub.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

1925. Mein Kampf (My Battle) by Adolf Hitler is published in its first part. "The great masses of the people...will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one."

1925. A protocol signed by the world powers June 17 bars use of poison gas in war.

1925. The Ku Klux Klan founded in 1915 stages a parade August 8 at Washington, DC, with 40,000 marchers in white hoods.

1925. The Autobiography of Mother Jones by Irish-American union organizer Mary Harris Jones, 95, says, "I am always in favor of obeying the law, but if the high-class burglar breaks the law and defies it, then I say we must have a law that will defend the nation and our people." "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living."

1925. "The business of America is business," says President Coolidge January 17 in an address to the Society of American Newspaper editors.

1925. The Menninger Clinic opens in a farmhouse at Topeka, Kan., where local country doctor Charles F. Menninger starts a group practice for the mentally ill with his sons Karl and William. Operating on the premise that no patient is untreatable, they combine a family atmosphere with physical exercise and a team of multi-discipline doctors for each patient--a "total-environment" approach inspired by a visit to the Mayo Clinic at Rochester, Minn. They begin a revolution in the treatment of mental illness.

Monday, July 21, 2008

The Vortex (La Voragine). Jose Eustacio Rivera. Columbian. 1924. Novel. Poet ventures into the Columbian jungle and discovers how thin is the veneer of civilization. In the face of the fierce, terrifying life of the Amazon basin, he succumbs to madness. Despair at not having lived to become a poet. We. YevgenyAzmayatin. Russian. 1924. Novel. Describes the regimented totalitarian society in the 26th century. Ancestor of Brave New World, etc. What Price Glory? Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings. American. 1924. Play. WWI. Profanity and brutality of professional soldiers and the wearying ugliness of war. Billy Budd, Foretopman. Herman Melville. American. 1924 (published). Novel. Collision of innocence and evil. Captain upholds military law, although Billy is justified in killing the cruel officer. Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie. Ole Rolvaag. Norwegian. 1924/25. Novel. Mental and physical hardships of Norwegian family in 1873 Dakota territory. Parade's End. Ford Maddox Ford. British. 1924/28. 4 Novels. Social changes brought about by WWI; gentleman throws off his social standards and traditions.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Old New York. Edith Wharton. American. 1924. 4 novels. Each novel deals with a decade from 1840-1880. False Dawn: Buys pictures far in advance of his time and is disinherited by his father. The Old Maid: Illegitimate girl raised without knowing her origin. The Spark: Elderly man comes under the influence of Walt Whitman. New Year's Day: Wife sacrifices herself to obtain money for her sick husband and is scorned by society.

A Passage to India. E.M. Forster. British. 1924. Novel. Difficulties of friendship between the races in British-ruled India.

Tamar and Other Poems. Robinson Jeffers. American. 1924. Poetry. Based on the biblical story of Tamar, daughter of David who seduces her brother. Modern Tamar seduces her brother, father, neighbor and brings destruction on everyone.

They Knew What They Wanted. Sidney Howard. American. 1924. Play. California wine grower misleads his mail-order bride by sending a picture of his handsome hired man. He breaks his legs on his wedding day. She allows herself to be seduced by the hired man and becomes pregnant. He almost kills the hired man, but relents.

The Tower Beyond Tragedy. Robinson Jeffers. American. 1924. Poetry. Based on the first two plays of the Oresteia of Aeschylus. Enlarges Cassandra's role: incestuous desires of Electra and Orestes' desire to break away from her.

Monday, July 14, 2008

1924. V.I. Lenin dies of sclerosis January 21 at age 53. A triumvirate takes power as Josef Stalin begins a power struggle with Leon Trotsky.

1924. International Business Machines Corps. (IBM) is organized at New York by former National Cash Register executive Thomas J. Watson.

1924. The first Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade moves 2 miles from Central Park West down Broadway to Herald Square, beginning an annual promotion event designed to boost Christmas sales.

1924. Ford produces nearly 2 million Model T motorcars for the second year in a row and drops the price of a new touring car to a low of $290, making a durable automobile available to Americans even of modest means.

1924. Music Corp. of America (MCA) is founded by Chicago physician Jules C. Stein. He starts a company that will innovate the one-night stand at a time when most bookings have been for the season.

Popular Songs: "It Had to Be You"; "Tea for Two"; "How Come You Do Me Like You Do?"; "What'll I do"; "When My Sugar Walks Down the Street"; "Everybody Loves My Baby (But My Baby Don't Love Nobody But Me"; "Hard Hearted Hannah, the Vamp of Savannah"; "Amapola (My Pretty Little Poppy)"; "When Day Is Done."

1924. The first winter Olympics open at Chamonix; the games at Paris attract 2,285 contestants from 45 nations.

1924. University of Illinois halfback Harold "Red" Grange receives the opening kickoff from undefeated Michigan State, runs it back 95 yards for a touchdown, scores three more touchdowns in the next 12 minutes, and a fifth later in the game. Sportswriter Grantland Rice will nickname him the "Galloping Ghost."

1924. Notre Dame University has an undefeated season thanks to a backfield that Grantland Rice calls the "Four Horsemen": Don Miller, Elmer Layden, Jim Crowley and Harry Stuhldreher.

1924. Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, both 19, confess May 31 that they have murdered their cousin Robert "Bobby" Franks, 14, "in the interests of science." Both are sons of rich families. Lawyer Clarence Darrow, now 67, saves them from the gallows with his eloquence and they are sentenced to life imprisonment.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

"Le Monocle de Mon Oncle." Wallace Stevens. American. 1923. Poetry. Affirmation of the imagination of middle age vs. the invalid fancy of youth.

"Peter Quince at the Clavier." Wallace Stevens. American. 1923. Poetry. Retells part of the biblical story of Susanna and the Elders; "beauty is momentary in the mind, but in the flesh it is immortal."

Saint Joan. George Bernard Shaw. British. 1923. Play. Presents Joan as an early nationalist; prototype of the Protestant thinker who puts conscience before the judgment of the Church.

The Sonnets to Orpheus. Rainer Maria Rilke. German. 1923. Poetry. Sonnets center around the myth of Orpheus: man must be fluid to exist in a changing world. Death is one metamorphosis among many.

"Sunday Morning." Wallace Stevens. American. 1923. Poetry. Narrator debates with woman who feels the need for some imperishable bliss. Death is the mother of beauty; earth is all the paradise we will know.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Robert Frost. American. 1923. Poetry. Stops horse to contemplate beauty of the scene, but then must move on. Frost has said he could have added forty pages of footnotes.

A Lost Lady. Willa Cather. American. 1923. Novel. Frontier woman moves from her husband to a lover, then disappears; rumored to be the wife of a wealthy Englishman in South America. She is seen through the eyes of an adoring young boy.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

1923. Bethume-Cookman College is founded at Daytona, Fla. Its slogan is "Enter to Learn. Depart to Serve."

1923. Published March 3 at New York is Volume 1, No. 1 of newsweekly Time, a venture that will mushroom into a vast publishing empire. Put out by Henry Robinson Luce and his Yale classmate Briton Hadden who will die in 1929 after having established a distinctive "Timestyle" by inverting sentences and inventing such words as "socialite," "GOPolitician," "cinemaddict," and "tycoon."

Monday, July 7, 2008

1923. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Russia, the Ukraine, White Russia and Transcaucasia), established on paper December 30, 1922, becomes a reality July 6.

1923. V.I. Lenin establishes the first Soviet forced labor camp in the Solovetsky Islands, northwest of Archangel. Slave labor in the next 30 years will build nine new Russian cities, 12 railway lines, six heavy industry centers, three large hydroelectric stations, two highways and three ship canals.

1923. United States Steel reduces its 12-hour day to 8 hours August 2. Big steel will hire an additional 17,000 workers in the next year, raise wages, and still increase its profits.

Thursday, July 3, 2008

Ulysses. James Joyce. Irish. 1922. Novel. Greatest 20th century novel written in English. Obscurity. T.S. Eliot: A landmark because it destroys our civilization. Disillusioned study of estrangement, paralysis and disintegration of society. Records events of one average day, June 16, 1904, in the lives of the three leading characters. Journeys about the city of Dublin, matched by inward journeys into the consciousness. Dispassionate description of details of daily life; details become symbols. Relates time in world of Dublin to timeless myth, history, religion. Plan of book parallels Odyssey; echoes episodes in the Odyssey. Central theme is exile; cannot find key to loneliness and frustration. Molly Bloom: embodiment of feminine regenerative principle of the universe. Her soliloquy in one uninterrupted long sentence ends with "yes." Joyce perfected interior monologue; parodies variety of literary styles.

The Wasteland. TS Eliot. American/British. 1922. Poetry. Breaks from conventional modes of poetic expression in its condensed use of language. Wealth of literary and historical references; lack of narrative sequence. Violent literary controversy on publication. Explores different psychic stages of soul in despair, struggling for redemption. Wasteland - central image of spiritual drought; contrasts with sources of regeneration. Doubt is not resolved; literary, religious fragments offer hope of rebirth, however, in foreign languages, suggesting unassimilated memories. In medieval legend, wasteland ruled by Fisher King, sterile by curse. Cured by purifying ordeals undertaken by a knight. Important event in development of modern English poetry. Like Joyce'sUlysses. Contrast spiritual stagnation with myths from the past. Both use city as major symbol of paralysis. Full of scenes, phrases, references with little meaning in themselves but echo, explain one another. Both depend on reader's knowledge of many works of literature, religion and history.

Siddhartha. Hermann Hesse. German. 1922. Novel. Search for ultimate reality through profligacy and asceticism. Wisdom cannot be taught; must come from one's own inner struggle. Parallels to Buddha's life, but not a fictionalized life of Buddha.

"Things." DH Lawrence. British. 1922. Story. Cynical account of two American idealists who devote their lives to art, beauty, Buddhism and European culture. Succeed only in collecting "things."